John M. E. McTaggart

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart, henceforth simply
“McTaggart”, was one of the most important systematic
metaphysicians of the early 20th century. His greatest work
is The Nature of Existence, the first volume of which was
published in 1921 while the second volume was published posthumously
in 1927 with C.D. Broad as the editor of the manuscript. In addition,
he authored many important articles on metaphysics, including his
famous “The Unreality of Time” in 1908, some of which are
collected in his Philosophical Studies (1934).

McTaggart was also a dedicated interpreter and champion of Hegel, and
in addition to many articles on the Hegelian philosophy, he published
the following books: Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic (1896,
2nd edition printed in 1922), which contains a painstaking
discussion of the nature of the dialectic as well as the results
achieved by its means, many of which are conclusions that McTaggart
continued to argue for throughout his career, including among them
that time is unreal, that existence exhausts reality, that modal
notions cannot be applied to reality as a whole, and that absolute
reality contains imperfections; Studies in Hegelian Cosmology
(1901, 2nd edition printed in 1918), in which cosmology is
understood as the discipline that applies a priori conclusions to
those entities and features that we are acquainted with via
experience, such as selves, the universe, and good and evil, and in
which topics ranging from the ethical status of punishment and the
nature of sin to whether the absolute is a person, whether human
beings are immortal, or whether Hegel is a Christian are discussed in
great detail; and A Commentary on Hegel’s Logic (1910), which
consists of a critical commentary on the alleged logical connections
between various categories by which experience must be organized and
the various transitions that lead one from Hegel’s category of Being
to the category of Absolute Idea.

The extent to which McTaggart’s interpretations of Hegel are
correct is not a matter on which I am competent to determine. For what
it is worth, McTaggart’s work on Hegel does not appear to be
highly regarded by contemporary scholars of Hegel, insofar as this is
reflected in the paucity of references to
McTaggart’s
interpretations.[1]
In what follows, I will spend little time on those works of McTaggart
that occupy themselves with the Hegelian philosophy. This is
unfortunate, since this might give the impression that grappling with
Hegel’s philosophy was merely a side project for McTaggart rather
than a task of much importance for his philosophical development. In
his Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, McTaggart tells us that
the exposition of Hegel’s philosophy has been the chief object of
his life for the last twenty-one
years (Commentary on Hegel’s Logic, 311).
McTaggart’s Hegelianism was also
important for the development of other philosophers such as Bertrand
Russell, whose early work was inspired by the idealism defended by
McTaggart in his Studies of the Hegelian
Dialectic.[2]
However, it is
worth noting that McTaggart himself later abandoned the dialectical
method that he took to be central to Hegel’s own
metaphysics.

The plan for this article is as follows. Section 1 will provide
biographical information about McTaggart. I will then begin to discuss
the central themes of McTaggart’s philosophy. Section 2 focuses on
McTaggart’s views on the methods of metaphysics. Section 3 discusses
McTaggart’s famous argument for the unreality of time. Section 4 will
focus on McTaggart’s philosophy of religion, which was a kind of
atheistic mysticism. Section 5 will focus on
McTaggart’s ontological idealism, which is a view akin to the
idealism of Leibniz and Berkeley. Section 6 will focus on McTaggart’s
position on what was perhaps the central metaphysical debate of his
period, namely, the issue of monism vs.
pluralism as well as the concordant issue of the reality of
relations. Section 7 will be devoted to a smorgasbord of topics of
interest to contemporary metaphysicians, including McTaggart’s
views on parts and wholes, the distinction between existence
and reality, and questions about essentialism.

Section 8 will be the final part of this article, and will focus on
McTaggart’s views on ethics. I will discuss McTaggart’s views on the
nature of intrinsic value, focusing on the questions of to what
ontological category the bearers of intrinsic value belong and what
kinds of features determine the intrinsic value of these entities. I
will also discuss McTaggart’s views on love, the emotion that he
accords the highest place in his ethical system.

John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart was born on the third of September,
1866, in Norfolk Square in London, to Francis Ellis and Susan
McTaggart (Rochelle 1991, 16). He was named at birth “John
McTaggart Ellis”, but took on the second iteration of
“McTaggart” after his great-uncle, also named “John
McTaggart”, died without descendents and willed his money to
Francis Ellis on the condition that his family assumed the surname
“McTaggart”. And so John McTaggart Ellis became John
McTaggart Ellis McTaggart. (At Cambridge, he was sometimes referred to
as “McT”.)

He began preparatory school at Weybridge, but because of his frequent
advocacy of atheism he was removed, and transplanted to Caterham.
There he became notorious for refusing to play football, preferring
rather to lie in the middle of the field (Levy 1981, 101).
He began to study Immanuel Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason around this
time (Rochelle 1991, 20).
He moved from Caterham to Clifton College as a boarding student in 1882. He
cherished his memories of Clifton College, despite the perhaps not
infrequent bullying he encountered
there.[3]

He began his study of philosophy at Trinity College in Cambridge in
1885 (Rochelle 1991, 42). In 1886 he joined the influential secret
discussion group, the Cambridge Apostles (Rochelle 1991, 45; Levy
1981, 103). At this time, A.N. Whitehead was already a member of the
group, and G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell would soon join in the
early 1890s. McTaggart graduated in 1888 (Rochelle 1991, 57). He was
elected a Prize Fellow of Trinity College in 1891 on the basis of his
dissertation on Hegel’s dialectic, which was later recast as
his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic. In 1897 he was made a
lecturer in Moral Sciences (Philosophy) at Trinity College, and he
held this post until he retired in 1923 at the age of 56 (Geach 1979,
14). He died unexpectedly two years later, in 1925.

Inspired by the work of F.H. Bradley, he published a pamphlet
“The Further Determination of the Absolute” in 1893. (This
pamphlet is reprinted in his Philosophical Studies.) There he
argued that there are three stages to demonstrating the
“idealist’s philosophy”. First, prove that the world
is not exclusively matter, next prove that it is exclusively spiritual,
and finally determine the nature of spirituality. He argues that it
follows from Hegel’s dialectic that the universe is timeless, and
that both knowledge and desire are mere appearance. The true reality
that gives rise to these appearances consists in finite spirits
perceiving and loving one another. The production of “The Further
Determination of the Absolute” was an emotional experience as
well for McTaggart. He wrote in a letter that “It was like
turning one’s heart inside
out” (Dickinson 1931, 37).

Throughout his life, he defended the claim that ultimate reality
consists of loving spirits. He did not live to see his final defense in
print. He died in 1925, at the age of 58, two years before the second
volume of the Nature of Existence was published in 1927 under
the editorial care of C.D. Broad.

F.H. Bradley was an important influence on McTaggart. McTaggart thought
that Bradley was “the greatest of living philosophers” and
once told G.E. Moore that when Bradley walked in, “he felt as if
a Platonic Idea had entered the
room”.[4]
McTaggart also greatly admired
Spinoza, enough to have a quotation from Spinoza engraved on his
tombstone. But McTaggart’s philosophical views were distinctively
his own.

In turn, McTaggart was influential in the intellectual development of
G.E. Moore. McTaggart was Moore’s youngest philosophy teacher at
Cambridge. According to Paul Levy what influenced Moore most was
McTaggart’s “constant insistence on clearness, on asking
the question ‘what does this mean’” (Levy 1981, 60).
Moore read and commented on early drafts of both
McTaggart’s Some Dogmas of Religion, published first in
1906, and the first volume of the Nature of
Existence.[5]

Bertrand Russell, whose early work was deeply influenced by McTaggart,
claims that McTaggart was very shy. In his autobiography, Russell
writes:

… McTaggart was even shyer than I was. I heard a knock on my
door one day… a very gentle knock. I said “come in”
but nothing happened. I said “come in” louder. The door
opened, and I saw McTaggart on the mat. He was already a president of
the union, and about to become a fellow, and I was inspired and in awe
on account of his metaphysical reputation, but he was too shy to come
in, and I was too shy to ask him in. I cannot remember how many
minutes this situation lasted, but somehow or other he was at last in
the room. (Russell 1951, 88)

Russell also tells us later in his autobiography that he wondered if
he would ever do as good as work as McTaggart (Russell 1951, 200).

C.D. Broad described McTaggart, who was his director of studies
at
Cambridge (Redpath 1997, 571),
thusly:

Take an eighteenth-century English Whig. Let him be a mystic. Endow
him with the logical subtlety of the great schoolmen and their belief
in the powers of human reason, with the business capacities of a
successful lawyer, and with the lucidity of the best type of French
mathematician. Inspire him (Heaven knows how) in early youth with a
passion for Hegel. Then subject him to the teaching of Sidgwick and the
continual influence of Moore and Russell. Set him to expound Hegel.
What will be the result? Hegel himself could not have answered
this question a priori, but the course of the world history
has solved it ambulando by producing McTaggart. (C.D. Broad,
1927, pp.312-313, quoted in Keeling 1929.)

He was on most accounts an unusual fellow, with a big head and a
crab-like
walk (Rochelle 1991, 97).
Peter Geach (1971, 10) reports that,
“To the end of his days he walked down corridors with a curious
shuffle, back to the wall, as if expecting a sudden kick from
behind.” Unlike F.H. Bradley, whose feline-directed nocturnal
activities were not so benign, McTaggart saluted cats whenever he
met
them (Dickinson 1931, 68; Rochelle 1991, 97).
(F.H.
Bradley preferred to shoot cats; see the entry on
F. H. Bradley.) His preferred
method of transportation was a tricycle, a fact which led a Cambridge
paper to publish the following poem about him:

Philosopher, your head is all askew; your gait is not majestic in the
least; you ride three wheels, where other men ride two;
Philosopher, you are a funny beast.

Although McTaggart’s early forays in metaphysics employed a
“Hegelian” dialectical method, McTaggart’s most
well-known works proceed in a fashion that would be familiar to some
contemporary analytic metaphysicians.

McTaggart conducts metaphysics almost entirely from the armchair. In
the first chapter of Some Dogmas of Religion, McTaggart
characterizes metaphysics as the systematic study of the ultimate
nature of reality. He then argues that the empirical sciences, such as
physics, cannot replace metaphysical inquiry. The argument is roughly
as follows. First, the claim that some empirical science such as
physics provides knowledge of ultimate reality is not itself a claim of
physics, but rather a metaphysical claim made about physics. And as
such the evaluation of this claim goes beyond the province of physics.
Second, McTaggart claims that metaphysical materialists, dualists,
Berkeleyian idealists, and Hegelians all accept the same system of
scientific propositions, whilst differing amongst themselves on the
issue of how these propositions are to be interpreted. McTaggart
concludes from this claim that there are metaphysical issues remaining
even after we have settled on our best scientific theory.

A similar conclusion is defended in chapter 3 of the first volume of
The Nature of Existence. McTaggart there raises the following
worries about using ‘inductive methods’ to arrive at
metaphysical results. First, McTaggart claims that the rationality of
using induction in general is questionable. According to
McTaggart, we need an argument for the rationality of induction, and
such an argument will not be an inductive argument. Second, McTaggart
raises two specific worries about using inductive arguments to derive
metaphysical claims about reality as a whole. The first specific worry
is that, since there is only one entity that is reality as a whole, we
cannot use an inductive argument to determine the features of this
entity. (McTaggart appears to conceive of inductive arguments as
exemplifying the pattern there are many As and each observed A is
F, so every A is F.) The second worry is that,
since there are infinitely many existing entities (a claim for which
McTaggart will argue for later in the Nature of Existence),
and we observe only finitely many of them, any inductive argument
moving from claims about the features of what we observe to the
features of existent entities in general will be dubious.

Perhaps McTaggart’s skepticism about the usefulness of empirical
inquiry for metaphysical investigations is why his twentieth-century
works are almost entirely devoid of commentary on the revolutions
occurring in fundamental physics. (Einstein is mentioned exactly once
in both volumes of The Nature of Existence, briefly and in
passing in section 369 of the second volume.) Unlike some of his
near-contemporaries, such as A.N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell,
McTaggart proceeds as if he were blithely unaware of the potential for
interplay between physics and
philosophy.[7]

McTaggart by and large proceeds deductively by appealing to
propositions he holds to be synthetic a priori and then deriving
further claims from them. McTaggart does allow that experience has a
role to play in metaphysical inquiry, albeit a limited one.
McTaggart’s The Nature of Existence explicitly appeals
to two empirical claims, first that something exists and second that
what exists is differentiated, i.e., has proper parts. McTaggart holds
that only the former claim is knowable only by experience; the latter
claim is derivable, he claims, from the synthetic a priori position
that everything has proper parts. This latter claim will be further
discussed in sections 6 and 8 of this article.

Moreover, McTaggart grants that the data provided by sense-perception
are prima facie true. That is, if we seem to perceive P, then
unless there are compelling a priori reasons or reasons
deriving from other perceptions to believe ~P, we should
believe P. This principle does real work in McTaggart’s
system. We apparently perceive that objects are ordered in time: some
events occur before others, whilst others are simultaneous. McTaggart
holds that there is a powerful a priori argument that nothing
is actually in time. (McTaggart’s argument will be discussed in
section 6 of this article.) But there is no powerful argument that the
objects that are apparently ordered by temporal relations are not
ordered by some other (non-temporal) relation. Perception teaches
us both that objects are in time and that they are ordered by some
relation. Only the former is called into question by McTaggart’s
argument against the reality of time. In this way, McTaggart arrives at
the question: what is the nature of the ordering relation that, in
conjunction with other facts, gives rise to the appearance that the
objects which it orders are in time?

Were McTaggart alive today, his (perhaps excessive) apriorism would
probably put off many of his analytic colleagues. But all of them would
appreciate his strong desire to make his arguments as clear and as
rigorous as he could make
them.[8]
G.E. Moore, who imbibed this philosophical
value during his time at Cambridge, had this to say:

How clear he was, compared to the majority of philosophers. And what
immense pains he took to get clear, even if he did not always succeed.
… I think it can fairly be said that what McTaggart was mainly
engaged with was trying to find a precise meaning for Hegel’s
obscure utterances, and he did succeed in finding many things precise
enough to be discussed: his own lectures were eminently clear. …
But certainly Hegel never meant anything that precise! After
these two years in which I was obliged to read Hegel, I never thought
it worth while to read him again; but McTaggart’s own published
works I thought it worthwhile to study carefully…. (Moore 1942,
18–19)

Whatever may be thought of these and other conclusions of
McTaggart’s, and of the validity of his arguments for them, there
can, I think, be no question that in respect of ingenuity and subtlety,
and above all, perhaps in respect of the clearness of his thought, he
was a philosopher of the very first rank. … Nor was it only
that McTaggart was naturally clear-headed in a very unusual degree: he
spared no pains in trying to get clearer and clearer about all matters
which seemed to him to be fundamental. Perhaps the most valuable lesson
which his pupils learnt from him was the importance and difficulty of
trying to get quite clear as to what you hold, and of distinguishing
between the good and bad reasons for holding it. (Moore 1925, 271)

McTaggart is most famous for arguing that time is unreal. He was
attracted to this conclusion early in his career, perhaps as a result
of his mystical experiences. In June of 1889, McTaggart wrote in a
letter to Roger Fry that he had some ideas about the elimination of
time (1991, 59). His 1896 book Studies in the Hegelian
Dialectic contains an argument for the unreality of time in
sections 141–142, but this argument is very unlike the ones that
succeed it. In 1908, he published “The Unreality of Time”
in Mind. This argument was later reincarnated in the second
volume of the Nature of Existence.

McTaggart distinguished two ways of ordering events or positions in
time. First, they might be ordered by the relation of earlier
than. This ordering gives us a series, which McTaggart calls
the B-series. A second ordering is imposed by designating some
moment within the B-series as the present moment. This second
ordering gives us a series that McTaggart calls the
A-series. According to McTaggart, in order for time to be
real both series must exist, although McTaggart holds that, in some
sense, the A-series is more fundamental than the B-series.

Although there are various ways to reconstruct McTaggart’s
argument, for our purposes it will suffice to consider the following
one:

Time is real only if real change occurs.

Real change occurs only if the A-series exists.

The A-series does not exist.

Therefore, time is not real.

McTaggart has comparatively little to say in support of premise (1).
(We find McTaggart accepting premise (1) in as early a work as his
Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, section 144.) Roughly,
McTaggart’s rationale for premise (2) is that the contents of
positions are events. There is real change only if events change, and
the only way an event can change is by first being future, then
present, and then past, i.e., by changing positions in the A-series.
According to McTaggart, an event enjoying qualitative variation across
its temporal axis, such as a poker that begins hot and later cools,
does not constitute an example of real change, since it is always the
case that the earlier part of this event is hotter than the later part
of this event. For this reason, McTaggart rejects the account of
change offered by Bertrand Russell in his Principles of
Mathematics (section 442), according to which something changes
just in case a proposition true of it at one time is not true of it
when evaluated at a later time. (With respect to any
proposition P, if P has some truth-value when
evaluated at a time, it is always the case that P has that
truth-value when evaluated at that time.)

In general, McTaggart believes that facts about positions in
B-series are ‘fixed’ in the sense that they are always true
no matter which time is present. The only thing left to change then is
which events are actually present. So if there is no A-series, if
nothing is truly ever present, past or future, then there is no
change.

McTaggart argues for premise (3) by attempting to demonstrate that the
existence of the A-series would generate a contradiction.
According to McTaggart, being present, being past,
and being future are incompatible determinations. But
everything in time must have each of them. How best to reconstruct the
rationale for this premise is highly
contentious.[9]
The intuitive picture seems to
be this. Consider an event that from our perspective is past. Perhaps
it is the event of McTaggart first considering the unreality of time.
From the perspective of that event, it is present (and we are future).
However, the ordering generated by the A-series is supposed to be an
objective ordering: an A-series is not thereby generated simply by
one’s arbitrary choice of a point of time as the present. Since
the respective situations are symmetrical, there is no reason to prefer
one perspective over the other. If we take both perspectives as being
correct, then we must say of some event (and every event by parity of
reasoning) that it is past, present, and future. So instead we should
say that neither perspective is correct, and that the A-series does not
exist.

Although time is unreal, our perception of temporal order is not wholly
delusory, for there is a real relation that really orders apparently
temporal events in the way that they appear to be ordered in the
B-series. This relation itself generates a series, which McTaggart
calls the C-series. (For this reason, McTaggart describes his denial of
the reality of time as Hegelian rather than Kantian, since (on
McTaggart’s interpretation) although both thinkers denied the
reality of time, only Hegel thought that there was an underlying
reality to which the apparent reality of time corresponded.) Were there
to be an A-series, the conjunction of it with the C-series would yield
a B-series.

McTaggart entertained several theories about the nature of the
C-series. One theory that he did not seriously argue against is the
view that the C-relation is a primitive transitive, asymmetric relation
for which nothing positive may be said concerning
it.[10]
I will briefly discuss a
theory that he entertains in his article “The Relation of Time to
Eternity”, which was re-published in Mind in 1909 but
was written at least two years before. (This article is also reprinted
in Philosophical Studies.)

In this article, McTaggart distinguishes three meanings of the term
“eternity”: the sense in which time might be eternal in
that it is infinitely extended, the sense in which
propositions (conceived as abstract objects) are eternally or
timelessly true, and the sense of eternity that pertains to existent
things that are not temporally located. An example of a putatively
eternal being in this sense is a God conceived as existing outside of
time. McTaggart focuses on the third sense of “eternal”,
which is the sense in which, given the unreality of time, every
existent is eternal.

Although the eternal is timeless, some temporal metaphors might more
aptly characterize the eternal than others. Some theists describe the
life of the divine being as one that is ‘eternally
present’, an expression that on its face is explicitly
contradictory. Yet describing the divine life as eternally present
seems more apt than describing it as eternally past. McTaggart cites
several considerations that favor metaphorically describing the eternal
as present. First, the present changes only by ceasing to be present
and the eternal never changes. The constancy of the eternal is like
that of the present while it continues to be present. Second,
many hold that the present enjoys more reality than the past or the
future, and many also hold that eternal things enjoy more reality than
that which is in time. So the present is more like the eternal than is
the past, at least in this respect. Third, the role of the eternal in
our emotional lives seems similar to the role of the present. McTaggart
claims that one who loves an eternal God experiences an emotion
relevantly like one who loves a presently existing thing, and not at
all alike the emotion of one who loves something that is merely past or
yet to be. Finally, neither past things nor future things have causal
efficacy, but arguably both present and eternal things do.

Although these considerations favor metaphorically describing the
eternal as present, they are not decisive. McTaggart argues that there
is some reason to favor instead metaphorically describing the eternal
as future. Suppose that time is unreal, but there is a real ordering
corresponding to the apparent temporal ordering. In other words,
suppose that there is a C-series. One theory of the C-series is that it
is an adequacy series. The things ordered by the C-series are
representations of how reality actually is, and the relation
that generates the C-series is x is less adequate than y. On
this view, states that appear to be present more accurately represent
reality than states that appear to be past, but both in turn are less
accurate representations than states that appear to be future. The
terminal end of the C-series consists in maximally adequate, i.e., true
representations of how reality is. Reality is timeless. So the final
stage of a series of representations that gives rise to the appearance
of a temporal order is a stage that represents reality as being
timeless. For this reason, McTaggart holds that it is appropriate to
describe the eternal as being future.

In chapters 44–50 of the second volume of the Nature of
Existence, McTaggart reassesses and rejects the theory that the
C-series is generated by the relation of being less adequate than. He
ultimately settles on the view that the C-series is an “inclusion
series”, one in which each element in the series has as a proper
part its predecessor in the C-series. The elements of the inclusion
series are misperceptions of reality, but they are not ordered merely
by the relation x is less accurate than y. Strictly,
McTaggart distinguishes many C-series, one for which each perceiver,
but argues that they are commensurable. The illusion of time is
somehow generated by facts about the parthood relations obtaining
between mistaken perceptions, but how exactly this illusion is
generated is a question McTaggart admits to not having an answer.

According to McTaggart, although time is unreal, temporal judgments
can be well or ill-founded in the sense that, given how things actually
are, some judgments about time and temporal ordering capture real facts
about the underlying reality that gives rise to the appearance of time.
So, for example, reality is such that it is better to say that World
War I took place after the American civil war than it is to say that
the American civil war took place after World War I. Although
both judgments are false, the former judgment at least correctly orders
some events in a real series, whereas the latter does not.

Although McTaggart was an atheist from a very early age, he was
certainly a religious person, at least on his own definition of
“religion”. In chapter 1 of Some Dogmas of
Religion, McTaggart defined “religion” as “an
emotion that rests on a conviction of harmony between ourselves and the
universe at large.” According to McTaggart, a necessary condition
on judging that there is harmony between the universe at large and
ourselves is that one judge that the universe is good on the whole
(Some Dogmas of Religion, section 11).

In an earlier pamphlet, titled “Dare to Be Wise”
(reprinted in his Philosophical Studies), McTaggart defined
“pessimism” as the view that the universe as a whole is
more bad than good, and “optimism” as the view that the
universe as a whole is more good than bad. According to
McTaggart, whether optimism is true is one of the central religious
questions. Probably no philosophical belief was more important to
McTaggart than optimism. McTaggart defended optimism very early in his
career, in a pamphlet published in 1893 titled “On the
Furthermore determination of the Absolute” (reprinted in his
Philosophical Studies), and the second volume of the
Nature of Existence concludes with a full-throttled argument for
optimism.

However, McTaggart denied that the truth of optimism required the truth
of theism. As noted earlier, McTaggart was throughout his adult life an
unwavering atheist. In chapter VI of Some Dogmas of Religion,
McTaggart defines “God” as “a being who is personal,
supreme, and good.” Although McTaggart’s definition
requires that God be a person in the philosophical sense, it neither
requires that God be omnipotent nor requires that God be
omnibenevolent. It merely requires that God be more powerful than any
created thing and that God be more good than evil. McTaggart held that
the three most popular arguments for the existence of God, which he
took to be the cosmological argument, the argument from design, and the
argument from goodness, cannot prove the existence of an omnipotent
God. McTaggart also raises worries in this chapter about the coherence
of the notion of omnipotence by calling attention to various paradoxes
and puzzles surrounding the notion. It should be noted that
McTaggart’s conception of omnipotence is very strong: for one to
be omnipotent in his sense one must be able to perform impossible
tasks.

Some Dogmas of Religion does not contain a direct argument for
the non-existence of God, but rather contains rebuttals of arguments
for the existence of God. The Nature of Existence does
contain a direct argument for atheism, which appears in chapter 43 of
volume II. This argument is roughly as follows. At this point in the
book, McTaggart believes that he has established that the universe
consists of some number of immaterial spirits, each of which is a
primary part of the universe. Roughly, to say that the
xs form primary parts of y is to say that the way of
carving up y into the xs is a privileged or
fundamental way of carving up y. For an intuitive example,
consider a sphere whose top half is blue and whose bottom half is red.
Perhaps the sphere has infinitely many arbitrary undetached parts, but
the way of carving the sphere into the top and the bottom half is a
privileged way of carving it. McTaggart then argues that, if there is a
God, then it is either identical with the sum of all that exists, or is
the creator of all that is distinct from God, or is the mere guider and
shaper of all that is distinct from God. God cannot be the sum of all
that exists, since then God would be a person who is composed of other
persons. But according to McTaggart, no person can have as a part
another
person.[11]

Second, God cannot be the creator of all else that exists.
According to McTaggart, that would make God more fundamental than any
of the other selves that are primary parts of the universe. But all
selves are equally fundamental. McTaggart has a second argument for the
conclusion that God cannot be the creator of everything else that
exists. According to McTaggart, nothing is truly in time. Since time is
unreal, there can be no creation. However, even if time is unreal,
McTaggart believes that we can truly say of two things that there is a
causal relation between them. But, if time is unreal, this relation
must be symmetric; in order to distinguish the cause from the effect,
McTaggart holds that we must appeal to temporal asymmetries, none of
which exist. Since creation is an asymmetric causal relation, and there
are no such relations if time is unreal, there is no creation, and
hence God cannot be identified with the creator of everything that is
not identical with God. For similar reasons, McTaggart held that there
cannot be a being who is the shaper and guider of everything that is
not him.

McTaggart was a mystic. McTaggart held that there are two essential
characteristics of mysticism. (These two characteristics are
articulated in his article “Mysticism”, which is reprinted
in Philosophical Studies.) First, mysticism requires the
recognition of a unity of the universe that is greater than that
recognized by ordinary experience or by science. The universe might be
highly unified without it being the case that the apparently
numerically distinct parts of the universe are actually identical.
According to McTaggart, Hegel believed in a mystic unity although he
did not believe that this unity amounted to numerical identity. On
McTaggart’s interpretation, Hegel identified God as a community
of finite spirits. McTaggart’s own view was substantially the
same, although he did not label the community of spirits
“God”.

A second essential characteristic of mysticism is the view that it
is possible to be conscious of this unity in a way different from that
of ordinary discursive thought. We can be conscious of abstract truths
or of spiritual reality directly in a matter akin to sense perception.
McTaggart calls this consciousness “mystic intuition”, and
that of which it is a recognition “mystic unity”. Mystic
unity is more fundamental than mystic intuition. The existence of
mystic intuition implies the existence of mystic unity, but the clearly
the converse does not hold. The universe might be highly unified
without anyone recognizing that it is so.

From a very early age, McTaggart had what he took to be mystical
experiences. These experiences presented the world as being
fundamentally unified by the relation of love. Reality as it appeared
to him in these experiences consisted fundamentally of immaterial
spirits who stand in the relation of love to one another. These
experiences provided him with great comfort, but he believed that the
fact that he had them did not provide others with a reason to believe
in the unity he took them to
reveal.[12]
Philosophical argument was needed to supply
others with a reason.

In general, McTaggart held that religious (or metaphysical) beliefs
cannot rest merely on the unfounded convictions of believers, or on
the claim that most people believe it, or on that we must believe it
in order to be happy, or that we should believe it on faith (Some
Dogmas of Religion, section 31). With respect to matters of
metaphysics, we need arguments. According to McTaggart, we also need
the courage to search for the truth and to follow the arguments were
they lead, even when are unhappy with where they lead. Since
experience cannot correct the beliefs of metaphysicians, if a lack of
courage leads them astray, nothing will lead them back to the
truth. We do not want to be driven to false
comfort.[13]

Although McTaggart denied the reality of time, he did in a sense defend
the immortality of the self. Since some judgments about time can be
well-founded even though false, it might be that judgments about
whether we will enjoy life again after our deaths are well-founded.
McTaggart held that they were, and moreover defended the view that each
of us existed prior to our births as
well.[14]

McTaggart endorsed both ontological idealism and
epistemological realism. Epistemological realism, as loosely
formulated by McTaggart, is the view that knowledge is true (justified)
belief, and that truth consists in correspondence with
reality.[15]
Ontological
idealism is the view that the sum total of all that exists consists
in
persons.[16]
According to McTaggart, although
reality is composed of persons, it does not follow that nothing is real
unless it can be known by some
person.[17]

McTaggart’s version of ontological idealism was inspired by
his reading of Hegel. In one of his earlier writings, “The
Further Determination of the Absolute” (reprinted in his
Philosophical Studies), McTaggart tells us that Hegel’s
view of the absolute spirit is that it is made of finite individuals,
each of which is individuated by how it is related to the others, and
each of which perceives that every other self is of the same nature as
itself.

McTaggart more or less interpreted Hegel as holding
McTaggart’s own view, which is that reality consists of a series
of either finitely many or infinitely many persons. Reality is
composed of persons and their states, which are parts of them. Each
person is perceived by some person or persons, and a person perceives
another person either by perceiving the whole person or by perceiving
some part of the person. Since, on McTaggart’s view, persons have
their perceptions (and other mental states) as proper parts, one way to
perceive a person is by perceiving a perception of that
person.[18]
Because
McTaggart allows that x might perceive a perception of
y without y’s perception being also a
perception of x, McTaggart distinguishes between perceiving a
perception (or, more generally, any mental state) and having that
perception (or, more generally, having that mental
state).[19]

Although selves have proper parts, McTaggart denies that any two
selves can ever share a proper part. Nor is it possible that one self
is a proper part of another. Further, no experience or mental state in
general can occur without it being a part of some self. McTaggart
claims that these are ultimate synthetic a priori
truths.[20]

Although persons have proper parts, the property of being a person
(which McTaggart calls personality) is a simple,
unanalyzable
quality.[21]
Although the self is, in a sense, a bundle of mental states, not every
bundle of mental states is a
self.[22]
We are acquainted with the property
personality, and contra Hume, Bradley, and perhaps Bertrand
Russell, each of us is acquainted with something that has this
property, namely oneself.

On McTaggart’s view, our perceptions are grossly mistaken about
how things are. It is not clear whether McTaggart holds that our
perceptions are grossly mistaken about what there is. When a
misperception represents the world as containing material objects, are
there some objects such that we misperceive them as being
material?

In the second volume of the Nature of Existence, McTaggart
endorsed the view that we never directly perceive material objects, but
rather infer material objects from what we directly
perceive.[23]
So, on
McTaggart’s view, strictly speaking perception never represents
objects as being material
objects.[24]
Perception, however, does represent the
existence of sense-data. But McTaggart also denies that anything is
a
sense-datum.[25]
However, apparent perceptions of sense-data are really perceptions of
something, namely persons, parts of persons, or sums of person-parts.
So my perceptions do succeed in correctly representing the existence of
something other than myself, although my perceptions grossly
misrepresent the nature of what is
perceived.

Why do we misperceive our perceptions of persons or their parts as
being perceptions of sense-data? Unlike the case of material
objects, when we perceive something as a sense-datum, our perception
itself (rather than a judgment we are led to by the perception) is
mistaken. McTaggart hypothesizes that, if there is a single cause
of this widespread error, it must be connected with the fact that we
misperceive a C-series as an A-series. This hypothesis is somewhat
supported by the fact that whenever we perceive some object, we always
perceive that object as being in
time.[26]
So the appearance of time is systematically
connected with every appearance of something else, and is possibly
responsible for radically distorting how that something else appears.

McTaggart’s argument for ontological idealism resists easy
summary. In outline, the main moves are as follows. McTaggart first
argues that every substance is gunky, that is, every substance
is such that it has a proper part that is also a substance. So for each
substance, there is an infinite series of substances that are parts of
it (Nature of Existence I, chapter XXII). McTaggart holds
that a priori reflection reveals that every substance is necessarily
gunky, although there might be respects in which some substance is
simple. (Were there to be persisting material atoms, there might be
entities that lack spatial parts, but they would nonetheless have
temporal parts.)

Second, according to McTaggart, for each substance, there must be a
sufficient description of that substance (Nature of Existence
I, section 105). A substance is described by mentioning its
qualities. An exclusive description of a substance is a description
that applies only to that substance. A sufficient description of a
substance is an exclusive description that mentions only qualities that
make no reference to other substances (Nature of Existence I,
sections
101–102).[27]

Third, given that each substance must have a sufficient description,
the gunkyness of substances implies a contradiction if substances are
either material objects or sense-data. McTaggart holds that the
gunkyness of substances and the requirement that every substance have
sufficient description result in a contradiction unless the following
requirement is satisfied: that the universe divides itself into a set
of entities – call them primary parts – whose
sufficient descriptions imply sufficient descriptions of every set of
parts of the universe onto infinity. In order for the sufficient
descriptions of primary parts to imply the sufficient descriptions of
all others, there must exist a relation of ‘determining
correspondence’ such that all other objects are individuated by
standing in the transitive closure of that relation to the primary
parts, which in turn are individuated independently of standing in any
relation of determining
correspondence.[28]

If material objects or sensa are part of reality, either there is no
relation suitable to be a relation of determining correspondence or
there are no objects suitable to serve as primary parts of the universe
because they could not be individuated prior to standing in such
a
relation.[29]
One of McTaggart’s arguments for
this conclusion has as a premise that objects with spatial properties,
such as material objects, always have their natures in virtue of the
natures of their parts. But in this case, unless some material objects
are such that at each level of their decomposition into proper parts,
new qualities sufficient to describe them uniquely are present, no
material object could serve as a primary part of the universe.
McTaggart then argues that no such qualitative variation is to be found
in the actual
world.[30]

However, if the primary parts of reality are persons and the
relation of determining correspondence is the relation of perception,
then McTaggart holds that every substance can have a sufficient
description even though every substance is
gunky.[31]
Since it is possible
that every spiritual substance be both gunky and have a sufficient
description, idealism is a live option. That it is possible does not
show conclusively that it is actual, but according to McTaggart, absent
any better hypothesis, it is the one that is reasonable to accept.
McTaggart holds that we can conceive of nothing that is not a material
object, a sense-datum, or something spiritual, and since the first two
kinds of objects are metaphysically impossible, the hypothesis of
idealism is the only conceivable hypothesis left standing.

McTaggart, unlike many of the idealists that were his contemporaries,
was a friend of the reality of relations and a kind of metaphysical
pluralist.

McTaggart’s realism about relations seems to be a relatively
mild realism: he believes in the existence of relations, and grants
that statements attributing relations to things might be true to the
fullest degree, but it is not clear the extent to which he believed
that facts about the obtainings of relations were
metaphysically
basic.[32]
It is true that the notion of perception, which is on the face of it a
relational notion, plays a fundamental role in his idealistic system.
Recall that McTaggart held that reality consists of immaterial selves
that are unified by perceiving each other. What is not clear is whether
McTaggart believed that whenever some x perceives some
y, it is virtue of the intrinsic qualities of x and
y. (In one sense of the term “intrinsic relation”,
perception would be an intrinsic relation if this claim were
true.)

McTaggart believed that the most extreme kind of monism, namely the
doctrine that there is exactly one thing, is incoherent. For if there
were exactly one thing, it could have no attributes or features, and
hence, on McTaggart’s view, would really be
nothing.[33]
For this
reason, McTaggart held that we must not think of ‘the absolute
spirit’ as an undifferentiated unity. In McTaggart’s early
paper, “The Further Determination of the Absolute”,
McTaggart argues that if the absolute has features, then it must have
parts standing in relations to one another.

McTaggart also rejected the less radical version of monism that holds
that there is only one substance. In first volume of the Nature of
Existence, sections 65 and 73, McTaggart defined
“substance” as that which has features without being a
feature. In his later article, “an Ontological Idealism”,
he defines “substance” as that which has features without
being a feature or having a feature as a part. The reason for the
revision is that at this point in McTaggart’s career, he accepted
the existence of facts construed as complexes of particulars
and properties. Facts satisfy the older definition of
“substance” but not the newer one. McTaggart argues
that we perceive that there are many substances, but also holds that it
is a priori that, if there is one substance, then there are many, since
it is a priori that every substance has infinitely many parts.
McTaggart also rejected solipsism understood as the view that
reality consists of a single person, which although infinitely divided
is such that nothing exists that is not a part of him. Solipsism thus
understood is strictly compatible with the existence of a plurality of
substances; however, McTaggart held that solipsism was ruled out by the
requirement that there be a relation of determining
correspondence.[34]

Interestingly, although McTaggart holds that some pantheistic
philosophers of the east held the view that there is exactly one
substance, McTaggart denies that Spinoza held this view, and moreover
does not attribute the view to his contemporaries, such as F.H.
Bradley. His pluralism consists in the fact that individual selves are
the fundamental units of being in his theory: from facts about the
selves, all else follows. He is clearly a monist in the sense that he
believed that all substances are immaterial substances.

McTaggart was a systematic metaphysician and so did what systematic
metaphysicians do: on his way to defending one metaphysical view, he
ended up defending several. We will briefly discuss some of the
interesting positions he advocated.

Hyper-essentialism. McTaggart endorsed a radical form of
essentialism. Any individual substance save reality as a whole has all
of its features essentially. In several places, McTaggart seems to
assert that it is meaningless to ascribe modal features to reality as a
whole. See, for example, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic,
section 47, and remarks made in his “The Further Determination of
the Absolute”. This view is motivated by the thought that,
although a substance is distinct from its nature understood as the sum
of its qualities, it nonetheless is individuated by its nature and so
must have it essentially. (See the first volume of the Nature of
Existence, sections 109–113). McTaggart calls the relation between
the parts of a substances’ nature extrinsic
determination, since, given the existence of that substance, all
of those properties that are parts of that subject’s nature must
exist and so in that sense determine each other.

McTaggart seems to have flirted with a kind of counterpart theory as a
way to soothe intuitions that substances might have had different
properties than the ones that they in fact have. After considering the
consequences of his view for the modal profile of ordinary objects,
such as the mountain Snowdon, he writes:

A mountain which differed from the actual Snowdon only in being a foot
shorter, and in whatever was implied by that, would resemble it so
closely in every characteristic that we are interested in that we
should certainly give it the name Snowdon. (The Nature of
Existence, vol. I, 117)

Although the actual Snowdon couldn’t have been shorter, there
could have been a mountain sufficiently like it to warrant us giving it
the name “Snowdon.”

Reality and Existence. McTaggart distinguished between
reality and existence, both of which he held to be
simple and undefinable qualities. According to McTaggart, the concept
of being is the same as the concept of reality, and so it is a
tautology to say whatever is, is
real.[35]
Reality is a monadic property, and does not
come in degrees. Existence is not to be identified with the conjunctive
property of being real and being spatiotemporal, for McTaggart held
that no existent is
spatiotemporal.[36]
Moreover, reality is not to be
identified with existence, since it is conceptually possible that
something might be real without existing.

That said, everything that is real might also exist. The first portion
of McTaggart’s the Nature of Existence is devoted to
showing that either reality and existence are in fact coextensive, or,
failing this, that can learn everything important about what is real by
studying what exists. As part of the project of showing this, McTaggart
argues against the reality of some putative entities that might be
taken to be real but non-existent. For example, McTaggart argues that
there is no reason to believe propositions (construed as
abstract objects). According to McTaggart, truth is a relation
not between a proposition and a fact but rather between a belief and a
fact, whereas falsity is a relation between a belief and all
the facts: to be false is to fail to correspond with any fact.
Moreover, on McTaggart’s view, there are no non-existent
facts.

McTaggart also dispenses with possibilities, and argues that
all statements about possibilities are best understood as concerning
connections between existing things. Statements apparently about
possibilities are really statements about actualities: they are about
the actual implications and non-implications of various characteristics
had by actual entities. (See section 40 of the first volume of the
Nature of Existence for further discussion.)

Mereological Doctrines. McTaggart holds the following
doctrines concerning the part-whole relation as it applies to
substances. First, McTaggart endorses unrestricted
composition: whenever there are some substances, there is a
further substance that is composed of them. McTaggart dismisses the
worry that unrestricted composition implies that there are bizarre
substances such as the substance composed of all the readers of the SEP
and the moon. (See chapter 16 of the first volume of the Nature of
Existence.) For this reason, McTaggart holds that there is a
substance that is composed of everything that there is. He calls this
substance “the Universe”. (See section 77 and chapter 18 of
the first volume of the Nature of Existence.)

Second, McTaggart accepts that the doctrine of temporal
parts is well-founded: if time is real, then objects have temporal
parts corresponding to each moment at which they exist. If time is
unreal, then objects have parts corresponding to each node in the real
C-series that they occupy. This view is articulated in several places
in both volumes of the Nature of Existence, and it plays a
minor argumentative role in section 163 of volume I.
Interestingly, McTaggart does not explicitly argue for the
doctrine, but rather seems to think that the doctrine of temporal parts
will be ‘generally admitted’. (See the second volume of
the Nature of Existence, section 412.)

Third, McTaggart argues that it is a priori that every
substance is gunky. A substance is gunky just in case it has
proper parts, and every proper part of that substance in turn has
further proper parts. Chapter 22 of the first volume of the Nature
of Existence contains a defense of this position.

Fourth, McTaggart distinguishes between compound substances and
groups. A compound substance is a substance that has other
substances as proper parts. On McTaggart’s view, every substance
is a compound substance. A group also has substances as proper parts,
but it not merely a compound substance. Rather, it is something more
akin to a set or a collection. However, McTaggart
explicitly claims that groups are not classes because a class is
“determined by a class-concept, while a group is determined by a
denotation.” (See page 276 of “An Ontological
Idealism” in his Philosophical Studies, as well as
chapter XV of the first volume of the Nature of Existence,
wherein he claims that classes are determined by properties.)

In addition to having substances as parts, groups have them
as members. On McTaggart’s view, parthood is not
sufficient for membership. Although the parthood relation is
transitive, the membership relation is not. According to McTaggart,
whenever there are some substances, they also form a group, and
whenever there are some groups they too from a group. Although there is
a universal substance, no group contains all the other groups. Finally,
no group contains itself as a part. McTaggart appears to have an
iterative conception of the group-theoretic hierarchy, although he
denies that there are groups with only one or fewer members.

One puzzling feature of McTaggart’s mereological system is his
apparent acceptance of a form of relative identity: x
and y might be the same substance while simultaneously being
different groups. In section 128 of the first volume of the Nature
of Existence, McTaggart considers the group consisting of the
counties of Great Britain and the group consisting of the parishes of
Great Britain. McTaggart argues that although these are not the same
groups, we ought to say that they are the same substance. He does not
appear to merely mean that this substance may be partitioned in two
different ways, and that corresponding to these ways are two
numerically distinct groups.

It is fair to say that McTaggart dedicated much more of philosophical
energy to metaphysics than ethics. That said, McTaggart did have
interesting ethical views, some of which will be discussed here.

In the Hegelian phase of McTaggart’s career, McTaggart defended a
form of consequentialism in which the ultimate good coincided with what
is ultimately real: a series of persons each of whose final end is in
complete harmony with the universe (and so with the final ends of every
other individual), resulting in the happiness of each
individual.[37]
Although the
production of this ultimate good is our obligation, it is exceedingly
difficult for us to know which actions of ours are what we ought to do.
For this reason, McTaggart suggests that we need a
‘criterion’ for moral rightness, i.e., a decision-procedure
such that if we follow it we are most apt to do what we ought to do.
McTaggart argues that a form of hedonistic utilitarianism is the best
criterion for moral rightness that we can reasonably hope
for.[38]
McTaggart
grants that sometimes this criterion could give incorrect results, and
that since following it is not a certain guide to what is right, we
must admit that our ethical knowledge is limited and incomplete.

The latter McTaggart was a moral realist cut from the same cloth as
his former student G.E. Moore. He held that (intrinsic)
goodness and badness were simple qualities, not
reducible to non-normative properties, and not reducible to the
relation is intrinsically better than. (See chapter 64 of the
second volume of the Nature of Existence for
discussion.)

The fundamental bearers of intrinsic value are either
persons (or other conscious beings) or states of
persons (which in turn he took to be proper parts of
persons). Because no person is a part of another person, the universe
itself cannot be taken to be a fundamental bearer of intrinsic
value. Therefore, one can say of the universe that it is intrinsically
good or intrinsically bad only if one means by this either something
about the average value of parts of the universe or by their total
value. (This view is defended in “The Individualism of
Value”, reprinted in Philosophical Studies.) McTaggart
opts for the latter view, and for this reason, McTaggart
accepts the repugnant conclusion, which is that a universe
containing millions of people whose lives are barely worth living
might be better than a world containing far fewer people, each of whom
live lives of spectacular value. McTaggart notes that this conclusion
would be repugnant to certain moralists, but sees no reason to think
‘repugnance in this case would be right.’ (See section 870
of the second volume of the Nature of Existence.)

Although persons or states of persons are the bearers of intrinsic
value, they have their value in virtue of having other properties.
McTaggart was an ethical pluralist, granting that many different sorts
of properties can contribute to the value of a state of a person.
Pleasure and pain are both intrinsically valuable (the latter having
negative value, of course), and both are present in timeless reality.
Pain is always intrinsically bad, regardless of whether the recipient
of the pain deserves to be in pain. On the basis of this claim,
McTaggart argued against the justifiability of vindictive punishment.
(See Some Dogmas of Religion, section 133, as well as
“Hegel’s Theory of Punishment”, which further
develops this view; chapter five of Studies in Hegelian
Cosmology is devoted to a discussion of punishment.) And
unfortunately, delusory perceptions, of which we are susceptible, are
intrinsically bad. For this reason, McTaggart concludes that absolute
reality is not free from intrinsic disvalue. (Even if pain is illusory,
the illusion that there is pain is real, and is itself bad. See
his Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic, page 155.) For this
reason, Hegel’s attempts to prove that the absolute is perfect
are doomed to
failure.[39]

Love is central in McTaggart’s theory of the good. Love is not to
be identified with benevolence, which McTaggart did not regard as an
emotion but rather as a desire to do good for others. Furthermore, love
is not to be identified with sympathy or sexual desire, but may
occasion both. Love is not invariably caused by pleasure and it does
not invariably cause pleasure. We might be caused to love someone
because of that person’s qualities, but we do not love that
person’s qualities but rather the person himself. We can love a
person whom we do not believe to be good.

According to McTaggart, love is “supremely” good. By
this, McTaggart does not mean that love is incommensurably better than
all other goods; were it, the smallest increase in love would be
greater than any other increase in any other valuable thing. However,
love is supreme in the following way: there is some amount of
love such that that particular amount of love is greater in intrinsic
value than any amount of any other good. On McTaggart’s
view, the goodness of other goods asymptotically approach the goodness
of that amount of love, whereas the goodness of love enjoys no upper
bound. (See sections 850–853 of the second volume of theNature of Existence.)

The optimistic conclusion of the Nature of Existence is that
timeless reality consists of persons who experience tremendous love for
each other. The quantity of love is sufficient in value to dwarf any
evils that remain. McTaggart argues that the value of this quantity of
love might well be
infinite.